Together We're Both Alone
by bendingwind
Summary: Darcy has a mom who used to be a showgirl in Vegas and a dad who is a financial advisor in Santa Fe. She also has a Tony.


**Together We're Both Alone**

by bendingwind

* * *

She's been told the first part of the story so often that she isn't entirely sure she doesn't remember it, but, well, it is kinda unlikely that she really remembers things that happened prior to her conception.

So Tony Stark is kind of Darcy's biological father. There was a thing where her mom used to be a showgirl in Vegas and there was a broken condom and all in all, Darcy doesn't like to think about it too hard. The first part of the story, the part she doesn't remember personally but hears about all the time, goes something like:

Darcy's mom was a showgirl, Tony Stark was a playboy, there was sex which is kind of ew but whatever. Everyone should have good sex. The condom broke, presumably, or failed in some other way and Darcy's mom is like, super catholic, and so then there was Darcy. Also a lot of bills, and since Darcy's mom couldn't pay them, she made some calls and had some tests done and swore up and down that she wanted the opposite of media attention for her daughter, and Tony had to pay palimony. Darcy's mom said he offered more but, _opposite_ of media attention, hello, and Darcy's mom said she'd rather just have the money and Tony had been okay with that too.

* * *

Tony Stark shows up for Darcy's quietly-celebrated first birthday with great secrecy and general sneakiness, apparently, though she sort of doubts the validity of those claims. Regardless, the paparazzi never caught so much as a whiff of illegitimate-daughter, and there are some really adorable pictures Darcy keeps in a shoebox of baby-Darcy propped up in a terrified Tony's arms. He visits when he can get away without being caught, which is not often, but Darcy spends more time with her biological father during the first two years of her life than the following twenty.

* * *

He doesn't come for her second birthday because, A, her mom marries George/Dad and they live in Santa Fe, and B, her mom wants to have a real party without all the need for secrecy. He can't make it for a visit any other time that year, either, but he talks to her on the phone for a few minutes. After that he makes time to call her on the last day of every month and talk for a while. He also sets up a trust fund that earns more interest in a month than most of the people on their block make in a year, which is cool, because then Darcy has a mom and a dad who love her and pay attention to her and the inheritance of a spoiled rich kid on top of that.

* * *

A few days after her third birthday, he does manage to find time to drop by, and strangely, Darcy _does_ sort of remember this visit. Her mom says he offered to try and get her a place on the waitlist for a prestigious private school on the east coast; Darcy's mom replied tartly that she thought Nava Elementary would do just fine for her daughter. She's pretty sure that Tony helped her build her first flashlight after he and Mom finished fighting, though. She keeps that in the box with the pictures.

* * *

She totally remembers the birthday-visits-slash-apologetic-gifts that come after that.

* * *

He can't make it for her fourth birthday, either, but Darcy is more upset because her mother refuses to buy her a motorized plastic car like the one Ashley and Casey have than she is that Tony isn't coming. She complains about it when she talks to him on the phone (mom makes her sometimes, it totally sucks, she doesn't even know what he's talking about half the time), and the exact green army tank she'd been wanting arrives for her on her birthday. It's really fast too, and she always beats Ashley and Casey when she races them down the street.

* * *

Her fifth birthday is marked by The Fight. Mom has a new job and so Darcy's going to be riding the bus to Kindergarten, staying for the after-school program, and then going home with Dad after he gets off work. Tony is totally appalled by this idea; he wants to hire a driver and a nanny for her. It devolves into shouting pretty quickly, and Darcy hides in her room, but she hears them anyway. Tony doesn't want her to feel lonely or neglected; Mom and Dad just want her to be normal. That sticks with her, because she _feels_ pretty normal, why wouldn't she be? but the shouting stops and eventually they reach a compromise. Darcy takes the bus to and from school, and the girl across the street comes over to watch her until Dad gets home every evening.

She kinda likes that Tony thinks she's normal even if for some reason Mom and Dad don't seem to.

* * *

For her sixth birthday, Darcy honestly, truly, does want a Barbie and _no,_ Tony, a G.I. Joe is not the same and she has enough Ken dolls, thank you. She doesn't want a chemistry set either, because she and her friends have made a really cool village around the lake in Ashley's basement, and ever since Casey popped the head off of the former Head Shaman Leader, they've needed a new one. Tony caves (he always does, he is_ the best ever,_Darcy totally wants to be him when she grows up) and sends her a Barbie in a fancy box with bows and the prettiest dress Darcy has ever seen and sparkly earrings that look like diamonds. She is totally perfect for the Head Shaman Leader of their village, and the other kids she plays with are jealous for _months._ Darcy totally has the best Tony ever, but she's not supposed to talk about him to other people, which is totally okay because she doesn't want to share him anyway.

* * *

Her mom and dad go on a vacation and she spends a whole week with Tony after she turns seven. He makes her a pair of roller-skates when she mentions that her friend Juany is having a party at the rink for her birthday, and he spends an afternoon in his lab teaching her to use them. They aren't allowed to go anywhere (Mom's orders, which is stupid because Tony promised Darcy he'd take her to Disneyland and Darcy _really_ wanted to go and it's stupid), but he orders Chinese and they sprawl across the floor in his living room and watch Cinderella and play Rat Trap. She's pretty sure he's cheating or something because no one's ever beat her before but he wins every time.

He's got a house that talks and a swimming pool and a _lot _of cars and he even shows her the engines of some of them, and it is the _coolest. week. ever._

* * *

Her eighth birthday is kinda one of the more memorable ones.

Darcy wakes up that morning and rushes down the hall in the general direction of presents. Her mother grabs her before she makes it out of the hall into the living room and holds her, looking a bit panicked. Through the window, Darcy can see that some sort of weird camp has sprung up on their front lawn.

"Mom?"

Her mother takes her back to her room and sets her on her bed, glancing nervously at the curtains.

"Baby, you know how you have two dads, Dad and Tony?"

"Um, yeah," Darcy replies, because she's not _stupid._

"Well, Tony is... a lot of people know who Tony is, he's famous."

"I kinda know what 'famous' means, Mom," Darcy interrupts, rolling her eyes. Her mother looks annoyed, but she keeps talking.

"And, well, all the people that know Tony _didn't_ know that he had a daughter before now. They're going to want to take pictures of you and ask you questions. It's not the life I wanted for you, baby."

Darcy doesn't really understand why that's such a bad thing, she likes having her picture taken and talking to people, but her mom keeps her in her room until Tony shows up that evening.

"Sorry, sorry, I was in a board meeting, I didn't hear anything for hours after the news broke," Tony says, breezing through the hallway. "How's my girl?"

Darcy pokes her head out of her room. Dad's in the kitchen, looking irritated, and Mom looks just as worried as before.

"Hi Tony," she says, grinning at him. He stares at her, looking a bit nonpulsed.

"Okay, so, you are way bigger than the last time I saw you," he informs her, deadpan, and she giggles.

He plays with her for a little while before he trades places with Dad, and he and Mom argue for a while in the kitchen. In the end they spend a couple of weeks on a beach in Spain and by the time they get back, everyone's forgotten about Darcy. The kids at school treat her kinda funny though, because she was gone for so long, and she never quite forgives Tony for that.

* * *

Tony takes her to Disneyland for her ninth birthday and confides that he's pretending to be on the other side of the world attending Very Important Meetings because hopefully that way no one will bother them. It is the_ best. birthday. ever._

* * *

So they Disneyland thing becomes sort of a _thing._ They go for her tenth, eleventh and twelfth birthdays until her mom puts her foot down about Darcy spending time alone with Tony because apparently he's a drug addict, alcoholic and manwhore. Darcy totally gets the first two (actually he let her try some whiskey when she was ten, and it was gross) but she's not entirely sure what manwhore means beyond being an insult.

Regardless, her birthdays after that are either Tony-less or celebrated under the close supervision of her mom and dad.

Still, at the end of every month, Tony calls just to talk to her for however long she wants.

* * *

So maybe Darcy has some sort of weird karma around her birthdays or something because they're usually either really spectacular or really, really horrible/mortifying/generally bad. When she turns sixteen a driver shows up as she's walking out of Santa Fe High with a brand new Audi A4 convertible that apparently is for her, and it is honestly one of the most embarrassing moments of her life (mostly because she'd _just_ been bitching about Troy's new mustang and him showing off his parents' money). For her eighteenth she gets an elaborate jewelry box that has a secret compartment with a fake ID and limited access to her trust fund. Tony even agrees to pay for her university, though he is outspokenly _not pleased_when she decides to go to NMSU. Their phone call the month she tells him lasts for almost three hours as he tries to convince her that _really_ MIT is a way better choice, and yeah he could totally get her in even though her grades are like, really good but not stellar, he has _connections._ She flat-out refuses.

* * *

Her nineteenth birthday has the same crystal-clarity in her memory as her eighth. It starts off with a pop quiz she was _totally_ not prepared for and her Contemporary Moral Philosophy class is an hour-and-a-half-long, thinly veiled lecture on The Evils of Stark Enterprises and Tony Stark. She gets out of class at two to find her phone full of messages from her mom. Kind of irked because it's totally her birthday and hells yeah she deserves all those birthday wishes but her mom _knows_ she has class, she calls back.

Her mom picks up immediately and says, "Baby I'm, I'm sorry... Tony's missing. He was involved in some sort of weapons demonstration and there was an attack on the convoy he was with. I'm really, I'm so sorry, I know it's your birthday but I didn't think you'd want to hear it from the news..."

There's a bench. She sort of sits or maybe collapses, same diff? and for a while she is silent.

"Darcy, baby?" her mother asks.

"I'm-I'm here, sorry Mom, I just... give me a minute to process, okay? He's, he's my-he's Tony."

"Oh, baby," her mom says. Eventually Darcy hangs up on her, takes the bus back to her apartment, and... just _is._

* * *

By her twentieth birthday Tony has reappeared, announced to the world that he has apparently turned himself into a superhero, and generally made a complete ass of himself on public television no less than six times. Darcy has flunked a semester from stress and changed her major like five times, and turned down almost a year of Tony's calls.

But, well, she's twenty now and that's probably an adult-ish age and she may or may not be slightly drunk when she gets home from the party her friends threw her, so she calls him.

"Hey, Darce, what's up? Is everything okay?" he asks, and he sounds... unusually sleepy. She's heard him manic and angry and irritated and a lot of things, but she's honestly never heard him sound so... tired.

"It's my birthday," she says, almost shyly. "I've missed you."

"I've missed you too," he says, and his voice sounds... warmer than usual. She smiles.

"I might be a little drunk," she confides, and okay, she is definitely drunk because it's fifty-fifty odds he'll tell on her to her mom.

"Me too," he replies cheerfully, "I won't tell if you won't. Happy Birthday. I haven't talked to you, I wasn't sure what to get you, Pepper said a condo was probably a bad idea. You want a condo? Your mother told me you flunked last semester and keep changing your major, so you might be there a while, and a condo would be useful and I will totally buy you one if you want. Or a house. Do you want a house?"

"No," she laughs into the phone, and he chuckles in reply. "No, but thanks, really, Tony. If I ever want a condo I'll be sure to let you know."

"Sure thing, Darce."

"So, like, I'm gonna fall asleep," she says, after a moment of silence. "I am definitely a little drunk. You'll call me on the thirtieth?"

"I am not entirely sure I'm awake, so, yeah, sounds good. I'll talk to you then."

"'Night, Tony."

"'Night," he mumbles sleepily into the phone, and she falls asleep with a smile on her face.

* * *

Twenty-one passes kinda the same way, except she's _legally _drunk this time, she has full access to her trust fund, and Tony has started not-so-subtly sending her post-grad applications to places like Berkeley and MIT.

Actually Berkeley sounds pretty okay if she can just finish her undergrad degree, like, ever.

Also she thinks one of her douchebag friends might have talked her into drunk-applying to be a research assistant for the next two summers out in the middle of Fucking Nowhere, New Mexico.

* * *

So yeah. She spends her twenty-second birthday packing to move to SHEILD with, uh, well he's sort of a god or maybe an alien and Jane is _really_failing at explaining which Thor is. They're going to be some sort of support staff to a new team of heroes that, uh, maybe sort of includes Tony.

She probably should have told Jane immediately that the world's most famous engineer and one of its richest men is, uh, sort of her biological father.

Whatever. Jane will probably get it when Tony asks what the fuck she's doing there.


End file.
